NGC 4940

NGC 4940 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 240 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 79,000 ly, about 79% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,145 km/s.

Because its light is 240 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4940 as it looked roughly 240 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).